Something that came up at work recently was instructing people on how best to configure local git clones for working with a "fork+PR" development model, where you have your own server-side fork for the project that you then use to submit pull requests. The trick is that there's an easy way to do this and a hard way, and it isn't immediately obvious which is which :)

The easy way:

* clone the upstream repo read-only

* add your fork as an additional read/write remote:

* e.g. "git remote add pr <URL of fork>"

* work in a branch

* e.g. "git checkout master && git checkout -b issueNNNN-summary-of-issue"

* publish via your fork, and then submit back to the main repo

* "git push pr"

* use the web UI to submit the PR

The hard way:

* clone your fork read/write

* still work in topic branches

* waste time keeping master in your fork up to date

* forget the previous step, and submit PRs against a stale version of master

I bring it up as when I first started using GitHub, the second way seemed intuitively obvious to me, but it actually makes things harder than they need to be.

Cheers,

Nick.

Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia